List Of Networking Devices [Computer Networks]

List Of Networking Devices

Theory:-A computer network or data network is a digital telecommunications network which allows nodes to share resources. In computer networks, networked computing devices exchange data with each other using a data link. The connections between nodes are established using either cable media or wireless media.

Network computer devices that originate, route and terminate the data are called network nodes. Nodes can include hosts such as personal computers, phones, servers as well as networking hardware. Two such devices can be said to be networked together when one device is able to exchange information with the other device, whether or not they have a direct connection to each other. In most cases, application-specific communications protocols are layered (i.e. carried as payload) over other more general communications protocols. This formidable collection of information technology requires skilled network management to keep it all running reliably.

Computer networks support an enormous number of applications and services such as access to the World Wide Web, digital video, digital audio, shared use of application and storage servers, printers, and fax machines, and use of email and instant messaging applications as well as many others. Computer networks differ in the transmission medium used to carry their signals, communications protocols to organize network traffic, the network’s size, topology and organizational intent. The best-known computer network is the Internet.

List of Network devices :

1. Repeater – A repeater operates at the physical layer. Its job is to regenerate the signal over the same network before the signal becomes too weak or corrupted so as to extend the length to which the signal can be transmitted over the same network. An important point to be noted about repeaters is that they do not amplify the signal. When the signal becomes weak, they copy the signal bit by bit and regenerate it at the original strength. It is a 2 port device.

Advantages of Repeater:

They require no processing over the head, so very little if any performance degradation occurs.

2. Hub– A hub is basically a multiport repeater.A hub connects multiple wires coming from different branches, for example, the connector in star topology which connects different stations. Hubs cannot filter data, so data packets are sent to all connected devices. In other words, collision domain of all hosts connected through Hub remains one. Also, they do not have an intelligence to find out the best path for data packets which leads to inefficiencies and wastage.

Advantages of Hub:

Hubs need almost no configuration.

An active hub can extend maximum network media distance.

No processing is done at the hub to slow down performance

3. Bridge– A bridge operates at data link layer. A bridge is a repeater, with add on the functionality of filtering content by reading the MAC addresses of source and destination. It is also used for interconnecting two LANs working on the same protocol. It has a single input and single output port, thus making it a 2 port device.

Advantages of Bridges:

The bridge extends network segments by connecting them together to make one logical network.

They can affect the segment traffic between networks by filtering data if it does not need to pass.

4. Switch – A switch is a multi port bridge with a buffer and a design that can boost its efficiency(a large number of ports imply less traffic) and performance. The switch is data link layer device.The switch can perform error checking before forwarding data, that makes it very efficient as it does not forward packets that have errors and forward good packets selectively to correct port only. In other words, switch divides collision domain of hosts, but broadcast domain remains same.

Advantages of Switches:

Switches increase available network bandwidth

Switches reduce the workload on individual computers

Switches increase network performance

5. Routers – A router is a device like a switch that routes data packets based on their IP addresses. The router is mainly a Network Layer device. Routers normally connect LANs and WANs together and have a dynamically updating routing table based on which they make decisions on routing the data packets. Router divide broadcast domains of hosts connected to it.

Advantages of Router:

They use a high level of intelligence to routing data. Routers can also act as a bridge to handle nonroutable protocols such as NetBEUI (Network Bios Extended User Interface)

6. Gateway– A gateway, as the name suggests, is a passage to connect two networks together that may work upon different networking models. They basically work as the messenger agents that take data from one system, interpret it, and transfer it to another system. Gateways are also called protocol converters and can operate at any network layer. Gateways are generally more complex than switch or router.